URL Channels or Custom Channels?

The first blog about optimizing tips posted today at the Inside AdSense Blog. This time AdSense tries to make things new, though many of us have heard of channels, most of us don't notice the difference between URL channels and Custom Channels.

URL Channels

URL channels provide an effective way to track your ad performance on different sections of your site or on different domains. Since you don’t need to change your code at all, they're easy to use. If for example you have a blog about cars and another one about boats, you can create a URL channel for each one. Then, when you optimize, you can use your channel reports to determine how your changes affected the success of the ads on each blog.

Custom Channels

Custom channels are great for pages with multiple ad units, since you can use them to track different ad units on the same page. To implement them, you’ll need to generate new channel-specific ad code. Let’s say you have a page with two ad units – one on the left side and one on the right. You can create a custom channel for each one, giving them distinct names such as ‘Left_Ad’ and ‘Right_Ad’. After you’ve regenerated the ad code for each ad unit and pasted it back into your HTML source, you can view reports for each ad unit separately. You’ll be able to see which ad unit performs better, and whether a change like removing the borders affects your earnings.

In short, when you would like to compare earnings within sites (with different domains) you should use URL channels and if you would like to see which ad performs better within a page (with a identical URL) you should use Custom channels. As mentioned by the AdSense Team over and over, you could notice which format, style, placement and your ads converts the highest earnings for you with channels. Let's see what's the next optimizing tip.